they were insecure as infants. There are ‘snares,’ as Moffitt calls them, that can get anyone. Secures do tend to come through it better.” Alan Sroufe, email to Bethany Saltman, March 23, 2018.
“In adolescence, attachment security” Joseph P. Allen et al., “A Secure Base in Adolescence: Markers of Attachment Security in the Mother-Adolescent Relationship,” Child Development 74, no. 1 (January–February 2003): 292–307.
Alan Sroufe and his colleagues L. Alan Sroufe, Emotional Development: The Organization of Emotional Life in the Early Years (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 177. From another note from Alan Sroufe on “felt security”: “I do think there are ways in which Bowlby’s initial conceptions sold human attachment short. Humans are not geese. Our instincts are looser. A gosling sees mother move and automatically follows. With humans there is much more mediation by emotion. Mother moves, and the baby (monitoring always) looks up, perhaps with the beginnings of concern. But she smiles and nods and says it’s OK and the baby relaxes and goes back to play. A major point in our 1977 paper was that it is better to think of the ‘set point’ for the attachment system is not physical proximity but ‘felt security.’ This makes the construct more developmentally robust and way less mechanical. When Azalea is off in college and gets hurt by someone she can call you; she doesn’t need a literal hug (not to say that we don’t sometimes). I think these changes in conceptualization are very important for clinical work. One can become secure even after one’s parents are no longer alive, and a therapist can provide a secure base with no physical contact.” Alan Sroufe, email to Bethany Saltman, December 7, 2017. See also L. Alan Sroufe and Everett Waters, “Attachment as an Organizational Construct,” Child Development 48, no. 4 (December 1977): 1184–99.
“felt security” Sroufe and Waters, “Attachment as an Organizational Construct,” 1184–99.
“Antisocial” behavior is considered Nathalie Fontaine et al., “Research Review: A Critical Review of Studies on the Developmental Trajectories of Antisocial Behavior in Females,” Child Psychology and Psychiatry 50, no. 4 (2009): 363–85. Clearly there is a racial bias here, too…White girls like me get away with things black girls would never. Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peace and Freedom, July/August 1989.
“the secure adolescent tends to create” Allen et al., “A Secure Base in Adolescence,” 292–307. Dr. Gordon Neufeld has written about the idea of “peer orientation” and how the kind of seeking I was doing is not necessarily always a good thing. When kids start orienting toward each other instead of their parents, an attachment rupture is definitely possible. I highly recommend the book Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers (New York: Ballantine, 2005), by Neufeld and Gabor Maté.
“Parental attunement and appropriate responsiveness” Moretti and Peled, “Adolescent-Parent Attachment,” 551–55.
“In our view, the explanation” Sroufe et al., The Development of the Person, 175.
Was my relentless pursuit of connection Ibid.
PART VII: A THING TO SLIP INTO
“This woman won our unstinted admiration” Ainsworth, Infancy in Uganda, 234.
Chapter Twenty-six
an article published in 1985 Mary Main, Nancy Kaplan, and Jude Cassidy, “Security in Infancy, Childhood, and Adulthood: A Move to the Level of Representation,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 50, no. ? (1985): 66–104. On February 23, 2019, the official citation count according to Google Scholar was 6,996 times.
At two years old Mary Main, Erik Hesse, and Nancy Kaplan, “Predictability of Attachment Behavior and Representational Processes at 1, 6, and 19 Years of Age: The Berkeley Longitudinal Study,” in Grossmann, Grossmann, and Waters, Attachment from Infancy to Adulthood, 248–49.